Interestingly, elements in the government tried to get around Hillary Clinton’s campaign to destroy Libya in order to save it. The Washington Times reports in the first of three promised stories, “Exclusive: Secret tapes undermine Hillary Clinton on Libyan war.”

Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli.

The tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants, chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns.

“You should see these internal State Department reports that are produced in the State Department that go out to the Congress. They’re just full of stupid, stupid facts,” an American intermediary specifically dispatched by the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Gadhafi regime in July 2011, saying the State Department was controlling what intelligence would be reported to U.S. officials.

At the time, the Gadhafi regime was fighting a civil war that grew out of the Arab Spring, battling Islamist-backed rebels who wanted to dethrone the longtime dictator. Mrs. Clinton argued that Gadhafi might engage in genocide and create a humanitarian crisis and ultimately persuaded President Obama, NATO allies and the United Nations to authorize military intervention.

The entire article is fascinating.

It was after Libya that, when Obama suggested bombing Syria on the pretext of a chemical weapons attack, that we got the unprecedented pushback from the American people through Congress that stopped it. I think this was largely because what happened to Libya was so gratuitous and evil that the people were sick of it. War propaganda lost its allure.

Will that hold true the next time our ruling cabal wants another round of American-paid slaughter in some far away country? Maybe.

But in the meantime, all the other nations of the world know that we went into Libya for no good reason and inflicted untold harm on the people we claimed to be helping. This is going to hurt us when we try to keep friends and wield influence in the world.

Especially, though not exclusively, if Hillary Clinton becomes the next president.